Tennis players always need something or someone to whinge about. In New York this week, it has, yet again, been the officials who judge their marginal shots and indiscretions.

Andy Roddick has been the most prominent and predictable, but by no means isolated, whinger. His reaction when caught foot-vaulting on his way out in the second round of the US Open was appalling, and it remains a mystery why he was not even cautioned, let alone fined – as Serena Williams was last year. His uncouth verbal assault was made on the line judge who rightly caught him out with one foot on the line when serving at 2-5 in the third set against the altogether more agreeable Janko Tipsarevic.

Roddick, an occasionally endearing brat who should have grown up several years ago, turned on the official with all the good grace of a kid caught logging on to a porn site. Or, as the New York Times delicately phrased it, "lost his cool".

The player said later: "It wasn't like I was up, and after it happened it was a different result. I'm sure a lot is going to get written about it, but the actual impact on the match was probably close to zero."

The impact on tennis did not seem to concern him.

Which foot, he wanted to know from the unfortunate official, was at fault? As it happens, she got the wrong foot but the right result, so Roddick, weirdly, felt justified in ranting like some third‑rate Broadway extra at a total stranger, who was powerless to reply and, more importantly, embarrassed on national television in front of a gob-smacked audience of millions.

Roddick's skewed view was: "It was the fact that I couldn't get her to admit that it wasn't the right foot that just infuriated me ... The lack of common sense involved in that was unbelievable to me. I just have trouble when they stick to an argument that obviously isn't right."

Such is the locker-room mentality of the disconnected modern sports moron. Roddick – in all innocence probably, given that he has been allowed to develop in this way over many years in a culture of cringing compliance by a sport terrified of upsetting its cash cows – could not, initially at least, see what he had done wrong. He had no thought at all for the embarrassment he had delivered on a woman paid a pittance to help him and his opponent to complete their match according to the rules of the game.

Yet, at the same venue last year, Williams felt the brunt of the establishment for her foul-mouthed abuse of Shino Tsurubuchi at match point in her semi-final against Kim Clijsters.

Williams, no darling outside her own home, was docked a point, lost the match, was subsequently fined and, as she put it to me earlier this year with heavy sarcasm, "put on probation".

She was as wrong as Roddick was this week, probably more so. But the crimes were in the same ballpark and Williams' punishment was quick and unequivocal. Roddick escaped with the fleeting opprobrium of media commentators.

A black line judge confided in me recently that he felt sickened by the way Williams was treated. "It was not that she didn't deserve to be censured," he said. "It was really bad. But the umpire made the unusual step of instigating action without any complaint from the line judge. Why do you think that was?"

It might seem like a scant defence – actually, no defence at all – but it does make the point that different rules sometimes apply to different players.

As unedifying as both spectacles were, however, they are of a piece with thousands of similar incidents stretching back to the bad days of John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and, well, pick your villain.

Tennis, supposedly the sporting home of probity alongside golf and cricket, accommodates, for reasons impossible to justify, behaviour that would not look out of place in a brothel. Millionaires screaming at the annoyingly compliant officials has always been the most bizarre spectacle. It is no more than bullying.

Where does it come from? Almost without fail, their parents. Anyone who has read Andre Agassi's compelling autobiography will make that connection. His father was an unremitting ogre, turning the talented and sensitive Andre into a sulking grown-up of explosive tendencies, a minor monster of the court.

Agassi had the good grace to come clean. We will probably wait a long time for Williams or Roddick to do likewise, even though Roddick admitted on reflection that he might have gone "too far".

He has gone too far quite often in the early days of his career. As have many players, given latitude afforded to athletes in few other sports, notably football, where petulance is tolerated because "that's the way it is".